Studio Profile
How a group of SingStar and VR veterans are finding inspiration beyond games
At Dream Reality Interactive, SingStar and VR veterans find inspiration beyond games
Videogames can be peculiarly hidebound creatures, dominated by conventions that are opaque to outsiders, in thrall to a small collection of pop-culture precedents, from Tolkien to Aliens. One of the less-sung benefits of latter-day virtual and augmented reality technology has been to let in a bit of fresh air – multiplying the points of contact with other artists and industries, all lured by the idea of entertainment platforms that set less store in questions of skill or dexterity. Few developers have embraced this opportunity like Dream Reality Interactive, the White City, London-based independent founded by ex-Sony London studio director David Ranyard in 2016.
During its short life, Dream Reality has covered plenty of ground, much of it familiar territory. It has developed a beautiful and usefully platform-agnostic VR maze game, Arca’s
Path, in which players guide an orb with their eyes, and a charming mobile AR puzzler, Orbu, in which you slingshot critters around verdant obstacle courses. But it has also looked for collaborators beyond videogames, teaming up with the Natural History Museum and Factory 42 to create the VR app Hold The World, in which users handle whale bones and fossils under the eye of a holographic David Attenborough. It has contributed to Bounce Works’ Apart Of Me, a mobile game designed to help young people cope with bereavement, and is embroiled in a number of projects for healthcare practitioners and educators.
Much of this reflects the polymathic persona and career of Ranyard himself, a garrulous son of Sheffield who has never quite fit the executive stereotype. Before entering the world of gaming as a programmer on This Is Football, he ran a vintage clothing store and played in a band, releasing two albums with Warner Bros-owned China Records. Despite leaving school at the age of 16, he also managed to complete a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Leeds.
During his 17 years at Sony, Ranyard generally operated on the outskirts of enthusiast gaming, executive producing the decidedly layman-friendly SingStar franchise and overseeing headline VR projects at Sony London. Dream Reality’s projects obviously draw upon that experience, but Ranyard feels he has more room nowadays to make the most of his many connections and interests. “I think for better and worse, I’ve become a bit more myself since leaving Sony,” he says. “Like
becoming vegan again, just as an example – maybe in a corporate environment I wouldn’t have done that, because it would have been a bit weird in international meetings. I know that sounds a bit trite! If somebody had come to me asking for help with a bereavement game at Sony, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything with that, to be honest. It’s just not part of the company’s ethos.”
Dream Reality is the fruit of Ranyard’s discussions with two other well-travelled executives – the company’s now-departed CFO Kumar Jacob, whose career spans the NHS, Christian Aid and Criterion Software, and Phil Harrison, erstwhile head of Sony Worldwide Studios. Initially, it comprised veterans of Sony’s
PlayStation VR Worlds, among them SingStar technical director Richard Bates. But it has swelled in the course of an office move from Farringdon to include younger souls from the realms of film, animation and education, many of them individually sought out and mentored by the company’s founders.
The agenda has always been broad. “I was quite conscious when we started of not putting a plan together, of not saying, ‘We’re going to do one thing, because in three years we think it’s going to be really important,’” Ranyard recalls. “Quite a lot of advice you get from venture capitalists is to do that – find that thing everybody’s missing and make it.” Rather, Dream Reality has built its own identity on the hoof, seeking out partnerships that are both valuable in themselves and an opportunity to explore. “We do this cool project, and we learn a load, but then we can apply it in a game or another project. For me, working with somebody across the table is really interesting.”
This readiness to experiment also reflects the continuing unpredictability of the VR and AR market, split across myriad headsets, phones and tablets, with few standout success stories to take inspiration from. “When we set out, we didn’t quite know where the magic was going to be, where the commerce was going to be. I think health and education have proven to be great spaces for VR, but we didn’t say ‘Right, the first thing we’re going to do is VR for education.’” There has been a strong element of following one’s gut. “I’ve probably talked to people in banking about VR, but the conversations haven’t gone as far, because inside I’m not as excited,” Ranyard says. “I’m sure there’s a great VR app you could write for visualising banking data, but I just can’t say, ‘This is amazing, team, let’s do it’. Whereas helping people with health issues, that’s something I can get excited about.”
For head of art Laura Dodds, a National Film & Television School graduate and former children’s book illustrator, Dream Reality’s work with other industries has been liberating, as has its overall commitment to accessibility. “My background isn’t necessarily that strongly in games, and that’s true for quite a few people in the studio,” she says. “They’ve come from the NFTS or Goldsmiths University. I think Dave looks for people with quite a varied background, who can bring a wide reference
“WE DO THIS COOL PROJECT, AND WE LEARN A LOAD, BUT THEN WE CAN APPLY IT IN A GAME OR ANOTHER PROJECT”
“THE NEW COMPUTE WORLD IS GOING TO BE BASED AROUND FULL 3D AND HOW WE INPUT TO THAT WITH OUR BODIES”
to the projects we work on. So it was a really great collaboration on Hold The World; that was a dream project, getting to meet David Attenborough, and getting to work with the Natural History Museum. It was the first one I got my mum to play!
“I think having the gravitas from film and TV has helped us with our VR projects, because there’s still a bit of a hang-up [in society] about games and new media,” she goes on. “Collaborating with the NHM and David Attenborough, it gives it a broader appeal. A lot of people who I don’t think would have necessarily tried VR, did so with that project, and they set it up in a museum, which was great for people who’d never had access to headsets.” Alas, one man the developers weren’t able to win over was Attenborough himself. “He uses physical mail, that’s where he is,” Ranyard laughs. “His daughter who travels with him, she has an iPad, but he’s not into that stuff. He’s very interested in technology, but in his day-to-day life probably less so.”
One challenge throughout the studio’s various ventures has been finding the balance between conserving resources and making the most of new tech or approaches. The VR and AR markets remain fragmented, with huge gaps in capability between platforms – releasing for several devices is advisable but requires a lot of investment. “That’s a side of it that people don’t often see,” CTO Richard Bates notes. “We spend a lot of time getting things running across those platforms. VR in particular is unforgiving in terms of frames, the framerate has to be constant all the way through, so we put a lot of effort into that. Because of the wide nature of things we develop, we have to pick and choose what technology to build and what to borrow.” This is a problem for designers too, of course: the triumph of Arca’s Path is that it doesn’t require a controller and was thus relatively easy to adapt.
“There are some good VR toolkits out there, like VRTK and NewtonVR, but we’re also developing our own expertise over the years, and we try to make sure that some of it carries forward from one project to the next,” Bates says. “It’s very fast-moving.” Among Dream Reality’s most trusted tools is the Unity engine, not least because the platform has attracted such a variety of talent. “There is a great community out there. A whole range of developers, from students and indies to the big companies in that space. It’s nice to have that community feeling.”
Two years on from Dream Reality’s founding, Ranyard and his colleagues have a more precise idea about where VR and AR might be headed. Ranyard suggests that the rise of a popular VR multiplayer game will be a critical tipping point. “I’m trying to predict when that’s going to be – 2021, or 2023? – because that is a really important point, commercially and creatively, when you can release a multiplayer game and know you’re going to have 2,000 people online at any one time.” He’s also fascinated by the prospect of characters in VR and AR that don’t just look convincing, but actively track and respond to the user’s own body language. “I want a character to be looking at you, and for you to say, ‘Oh my god, my heart’s breaking’, as opposed to, ‘Ah, it’s a monster.’” In Ranyard’s view, this is part of an overall shift towards human-computer interaction in 3D space, facilitated as much by the rise of digital AI assistants as VR and AR games. “It’s not the traditional, number-crunching database in the background, it’s a neural net. The new compute world is going to be based around full 3D and how we input to that with our bodies, with an AI backend that has a more sophisticated, natural way of processing and presenting that information to us.”
It’s a prospect that may unnerve as much as it enthrals. In the shorter term, the benefit of Dream Reality’s cross-industry experimentation with AR and VR is a broadening of the concept of the videogame itself. “I’m making massive generalisations, but I think sometimes games that focus on delivering very visceral experiences don’t leave much space for the player to contemplate and be challenged, engaged in different ways,” Dodds observes. Working with creators in other fields, all drawn by the promise of truly “immersive” tech, is a great way for the industry to grow, even if that promise never quite becomes flesh. “When I was younger I wanted to be a cinematographer, and learning lighting and composition is really helpful for games. I don’t think that’s a revolutionary thing – lots of people have been bringing cinematic language into games – but I certainly find it helpful to look at mediums that are more established, and have already developed languages of their own.”